Tomorrow Digg.com releases version 3.0. Why is this significant? Take a look at this comparison to the New York Times website. Digg.com has about 800,000 unique visitors every day and is doubling in traffic every two months.
Digg is a social news site. There are no editors at this site. Instead the users of Digg submit stories and vote on the stories that have been submitted. Enough votes get a story on the front page. What is really stunning about the fact that the two year old digg.com is on its way to surpassing nytimes.com is that Digg has reached this level of traffic while being focused entirely on technology news (with politics and other tangentially related topics slipping in on the edges). Tomorrow that changes.
Digg 3.0 will add to Technology the following new topics: Science, Entertainment, World & Business (which includes Politics), Gaming and Videos. With this change Digg will directly compete against the New York Times site and other news sites using a traditional editorial model. There are at least two reasons that I find this interesting as a libertarian. First, traditional media has acted as a gatekeeper of what is considered newsworthy. The State has fared pretty well under this arrangement. We have already seen the Internet limit the ability of the State to control information. One can hope that the rise of Digg and similar sites will give us more of that.
Secondly, though Digg.com founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson are fond of using the term “democracy” to refer to how Digg news works, I do not think this is democracy in the negative “god that failed” sense. Rather this is democracy in something closer to the “participatory democracy” sense that Rothbard found so promising. Stories do not succeed on Digg because they pass muster with the elite gatekeepers but because regular folks find them interesting. Unlike the once-every-four-years participation available to most people in political democracy, on Digg users can, and do, participate daily even hourly. Starting tomorrow getting a pro-liberty story in front of millions of people can be as simple as submitting it to Digg, (assuming people find it interesting). And, yes, you can post a story about the State’s evil doings on your Blog and then immediately submit it yourself. And the New York Times can’t do a damn thing about it.
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If you like Digg, you should take a look at Reddit.com. It has many more business, political, and general interest articles that hit the main page. I have even seen numerous articles from LRC and Mises.org make it to the top.
Also, freedomslut.com is apparently a social bookmarking site specifically for libertarians.
A couple of comments. I peruse the digg feed throughout the day, however it has a much higher signal to noise ratio than I would prefer.
In addition, a recent analysis (http://enfact.com/blog/?p=76 — his site is down) shows that approximately 60% of Digg’s front page is voted on by the top 0.03% users. This in and of itself is not a bad thing, however it’s also fairly simple to “game” (you only need about 30 unique accounts to get a story on the front page), so nonsensical spam and PR schemes still makes it through the system.
Other than that, good point about the “participatory democracy” versus elite gatekeepers.
And for the up-to-the-second types, diggvsdot.com is a side-by-side comparison of which site breaks the news the fastest.
It has a higher signal to noise ratio than you’d like? You want more noise? I’ll assume you meant lower
Tim,
In a TechCrunch interview CEO Jay Adelson explains that of the unique users (about 700,000-800,000/day) an impressive 1/5 to 1/3 of those unique visitors participate in Digg. Participation means either submitting stories, digging (voting for) stories, commenting on stories or burying stories.
Also, in the post I said that digg is 2 years old. To be precise they started in December 2004 so they are really about 1.5 years old. Some other interesting stats mentioned in that interview:
Re: Peter and Stephen
I’m an Aggie, you’ll have to pardon my errors above. Gracias.
This would be a great time to let us know if you have a Digg Member Name (or get one and then let us know). The steps are described here by David Veksler. If a number of people add their Digg Member Names then I’ll bug David about finally posting the list he promised so that we can add each other as friends on Digg and start working together to promote libertarian articles.
In fact, if you do this please shoot me an e-mail (Stephen at RadicalLiberation.com).
registered for digg.com over 12 hours ago… still no confirmation email to activate my account.
I do see that you have Kevin Rose, geek celebrity, on your friend list, though.
Kudos.
http://www.government-free-credit-report.info
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